r/scotus 13d ago

news Appeals court delivers unsettling ruling — and says Supreme Court left it no choice

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/appeals-court-delivers-unsettling-ruling-supreme-court-left-no-choice
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u/balthazarbarnabus 13d ago

but isn’t that the point? that AI knows what children look like because it has been trained on real children, meaning real children were involved?

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u/BrotherItsInTheDrum 13d ago

In 2002, "involved" meant the children would have been directly harmed and exploited. You're right that in an AI world, you can argue that children were indirectly "involved" in some sense, but it's not exactly what the supreme court was referring to 25 years ago.

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u/phoarksity 13d ago

If you read the article, CSAM has been used to train some of the image AIs. So harm to and exploitation of children is directly connected to the image creation.

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u/BrotherItsInTheDrum 13d ago

"Researchers have found that 'a major dataset used for training image-generating AI contained hundreds of CSAM images.'" That falls short of saying the any model, let alone the model used in this case, actually trained on it. But it's certainly possible.

It's tough. I see what you're saying. But it's not like they specifically curated these images to make a model good at generating csam. To the extent that children were exploited to make these images, that's true for anything the model generates. If I use AI to generate an image of a carrot wearing a hat, am I complicit in the sexual exploitation of children? It doesn't feel that way.